The Demon Frenchman of George Street
Author Jan Bondeson tells a dark story sited in the city centre in another extract from his book Murder Houses of Edinburgh
Eugène Marie Chantrelle was born at Nantes in 1838, the son of the ship owner Jean Etienne Chantrelle and his wife Marie Anne, born Martinet. He had a maiden aunt in Nantes named Marie Martinet, who was alive as late as the 1870s. According to his marriage certificate, he was born in 1838, but his biographer Mr A. Duncan Smith prefers the year 1834. He is likely to have received some degree of a university education, since he knew excellent Latin and Greek, and good English and German, and since his medical knowledge was better than what could be expected from an uneducated layperson. According to his own account, he studied medicine in Strasbourg for four years. He had taken part in the Paris riots of 1851, being wounded when fighting on the barricades, for the republican side. He then claimed to have gone to America for a while, as a teacher of languages.
In 1862, Eugène Chantrelle turned up in England, visiting Newcastle, Leicester and other places as a teacher. According to an article in the Edinburgh Evening News, published after Chantrelle’s downfall, he was sentenced to nine month’s imprisonment in Brighton for sexually assaulting a young lady, presumably one of his pupils. In 1864 or 1865, Eugène went on to Edinburgh, where he took a comfortable house at 81A George Street, living on the second and third floors above a shop. He advertised for private pupils in the Scotsman newspaper of January 4 1865. Since Eugène was a rather handsome, elegantly dressed man, and obviously a person of learning and culture, he was employed at several schools, including the private Newington Academy, where he began work in December 1865. Here, he met the pretty 15-year-old schoolgirl Elizabeth Cullen Dyer, who came from a distinguished Edinburgh family. After a short acquaintance, when she showed obvious signs of pregnancy, a shotgun marriage ensued on August 11 1868. On their marriage certificate, the bride’s age is wrongly given as 18 and the groom’s age is underestimated as well. Elizabeth moved into 81A George Street, where she gave birth to her eldest son Eugène John later the same year. A second child was born in 1870 but did not live long.
Initially, Eugène and Elizabeth Chantrelle got on well together: he kept teaching at various schools and she minded her surviving son. There was a schoolroom in the house where he taught private pupils who wanted to brush up their French or Latin. In 1875, he published Reading Lessons in Latin with Practical Exercises, a scarce and privately published book not held by any library, although his biographer William Roughead had a copy of it, which is now in the Signet Library. But soon the marriage of the two Chantrelles was breaking up. Eugène drank French wine and champagne with enthusiasm, but he also developed a taste for the Scottish national drink, emptying a bottle of whisky per day. He beat and mistreated Elizabeth, and sometimes kicked her out into the common stair at night, forcing her to take refuge in the flat below. He cursed her in bloodcurdling terms, saying that he would shoot her with a loaded pistol he used to carry around, or that he would make use of his medical knowledge to kill her with a poison that could not be detected. Fearful for her life, she wrote to her mother complaining of her abusive husband, but old Mrs Dyer advised her to stay with him. There was by now three little Chantrelles to feed, with Louis being born in 1871 and James Ernest in 1876, and she did not want the family to be split up. A man of voracious sexual appetite, Eugène was a regular at a fashionable brothel in Clyde Street, where he drank champagne and caroused with the harlots, sometimes firing off his pistol to make them jump.
In 1877, Eugène left his pistol lying about when the family was visiting Portobello: his son Eugène John grabbed it and fired off a shot that went through the hand of his brother Louis, before lodging in the fleshy part of Eugène’s thumb. The Frenchman gave a fearful yell when a local doctor came and extracted the bullet. This narrow escape from being shot dead by his own son made Eugène consider insuring his life, or so at least he claimed: in October 1877, he took out £1,000 policies on both his own life and that of his wife. Elizabeth was fearful that Eugène would murder her now when her life was insured, but her mother, who seems to
The post-mortem examination demonstrated the presence of opium in the vomit on the patient’s nightdress
have been entirely devoid of common sense, pooh-poohed her concerns. On New Year’s Eve 1877, everything seemed normal in the Chantrelle household. The jovial paterfamilias had lately run into debt due to his extravagant life, but still he drank wine and champagne like water. When twelve o’clock was striking, the family listened to the band of the Castle garrison playing festive hymns, having invited their servant Mary Byrne to join them.
On the morning of New Year’s Day,
Elizabeth felt a little unwell, complaining of a slight headache. Eugène sent his eldest son out to purchase a duck for dinner, but Elizabeth vomited and did not eat anything. After she had been put to bed, Eugène took all three children into his own bedroom and left his wife some lemonade, grapes and an orange to eat. The following morning, the servant Mary Byrne rose before seven to make a cup of tea for her mistress. When she was lighting the kitchen fire, she heard a moaning sound from Elizabeth’s room. The door to the room was open, whereas it was regularly kept shut; the gas was turned off and there was no smell of gas in the room.
Elizabeth was lying on the bed moaning piteously, and the pillow and bedclothes were stained with vomit. The tumbler of lemonade was empty and only two small portions remained of the orange. In the parlour was a large, empty whisky bottle. When Eugène was roused, he went to see his unconscious wife, who did not stir. He asked Mary Byrne if she could smell gas in the room, something she denied. He then said that the baby was crying and asked her to look after it, but when she came into the other bedroom, she found all three children sleeping peacefully. Returning to the sick bed, she could see her master coming from the window of the room. Summoned by Eugène, Dr Carmichael, of 42 Northumberland Street, arrived at 8.30 am. He could smell gas in the room and suspected coal-gas poisoning. He brought some brandy to inject as a stimulant, but the thirsty Eugène drank much of the contents of the bottle when the doctor was not looking.
FOUL PLAY
Dr Carmichael called in the police surgeon Dr Littlejohn, and Mrs Dyer brought her own family doctor along to see Elizabeth, who was now deeply unconscious. The doctors tried artificial respiration but to little avail, and the patient died at the Royal Infirmary soon after. The histrionic Eugène exhibited grief and rage, accusing the doctors of murdering his wife. When the gas company was called in, they found that a gas pipe behind one of the shutters of Elizabeth’s bedroom had been wrenched loose by some person. But the doctors no longer thought the symptoms were those of coal-gas poisoning; Dr Gordon, who had seen many poisoning cases before, instead thought the patient had died from the administration of some narcotic poison. And indeed, the post-mortem examination demonstrated the presence of opium in the vomit on the patient’s nightdress. When Elizabeth was buried, there were distressing scenes when the frantic Eugène tried to fling himself into the open grave. But after it had been established that on November 25 1877, he had purchased sixty grains of opium, he was arrested for murdering his wife. A strange matter was that her urine had an alcoholic odour, suggesting that he might have administered the poison in some of the whisky from the empty bottle found in the parlour.
The loose gas pipe had just been a clumsy attempt to make the death look like an accident, so that he could cash in the life insurance money without any demur.
ON TRIAL
The trial of Eugène Chantrelle began on May 7 1878, before Lord Moncrieff. Mr William Watson, the Lord Advocate, led for the prosecution, and Mr John Traynor led Chantrelle’s defence team. The maid Mary Byrne gave her damning evidence clearly and without contradiction: it suggested that after poisoning his wife, Eugène had lured her out of the sickroom to be able to sever the gas pipe and simulate an accident. She described his heavy drinking and angry outbursts, screaming ‘Go to hell!’ and ‘I will kick you out!’ at his wife in the presence of the servant. There was a painful interlude as the little boy Eugène John described how his papa used to call mamma bad names, swear at her, strike her, and make her cry. Papa had also freely cuffed and kicked the children when they made a noise, although he had never administered a proper thrashing. A former maid described how, in 1876, she had rescued Madame Chantrelle from her abusive husband; when they had reported the matter to a police constable, the furious Frenchman had screamed, prophetically as it turned out, ‘I will do for the bitch yet!’ Yet another maid described how Eugène kissed her and tried to take liberties with her, only desisting when she threatened to tell her mistress. The amorous Frenchman had just 17 shillings in the bank and he owed £200 to various tradesmen.
The medical evidence pointed in favour of opium poisoning, the very same poison the prisoner had purchased a quantity of just weeks before the murder. The defence had a difficult task, concentrating on finding witnesses that corroborated some of the prisoner’s statements, and persons who could testify that he was not always violent and abusive to his wife. The jury returned a verdict of guilty and Lord Moncrieff sentenced the prisoner to death. He asked for a glass of whisky per day and a supply of tobacco and cigarette paper. When asked, on the night before the execution, whether there was anything he wanted, the prisoner said ‘Send in three bottles of champagne and a whore!’, a request that was denied him.